Tag Archives: Speed

Now that the Sony Xperia 1 has been reviewed by more people, there are now sufficient video samples at 960fps to make a judgment on the performance of the slow motion mode. As you may recall, the phone is only capable of recording 0.1 seconds at 960p at full HD 1080p and 0.2 seconds at 720p at the same frame rate. That translates to a maximum of 3.2 seconds at 1080p played back at 30p and 6.4 seconds at 720p 30fps.

There is no increase in recording time from the XZ2 and XZ3 phones which had essentially the same feature as the Xperia 1. We, however, saw a little better color reproduction and slightly better artifact handling on the new phone but so minute an edge that we simply cannot recommend upgrading for this feature or considering it over other 720p slow motion phones like the Galaxy S10 or OnePlus 7.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←

It’s been a while since we’ve covered the fps4000 camera mainly due to development time taking longer than initially estimated. However, Graham Rowan the engineer behind the camera has now posted the first 4k 480fps footage shot in RAW on the fps4000 camera which uses a sophisticated memory arrangement on the onboard super-fast flash RAM to be able to record lengths of time unimaginable before on slow motion cameras at high resolution.

This camera is a very different kind of technology from regular high-speed cameras that record to volatile DRAM. The fps series records to flash chips that are soldered to the mainboard and allow a variety of frames rates and resolutions depending on the sensor used but all is saved on the flash memory as a non-volatile stream of data. Modern SSD chips are so good at re-allocating reading and writing bits that the life of the components is now measured in decades of regular use instead of a few years. The fps4000 is using this technology fully to enable memory bandwidth magnitudes greater at a significantly reduced cost.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←

To better encapsulate the slow motion happenings of the web we are starting a new post type called Fraction/s as in “Fractions of a Second” that shows anything and everything related to slow motion that has happened recently. This is based on the fact that high speed imaging hardware releases have been stabilizing and slowing down compared to previous years. This way we can better cover anything small or large related to this craft.

Thanks to our readers who have submitted a lot of this information which sometimes escapes us. There is a lot of interest in slow motion related information but it is easy to get buried in the mountain of daily information. We hope that we cover many of these occurrences so you get to see them.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←

So now that the Xperia 1 phone has started shipping to some parts of Asia and Oceania it is time to see what the initial slow motion 960fps samples look like. It seems that the length of the playback video is unchanged at 6.4 seconds for 720p and 3.2 seconds for 1080p. So 96frames are recorded at 1080p 960fps and 192frames at 720p. This is the same restrictive spec for three years in a row by Sony.

You would think by now the phone could have increased the slow motion buffer to something useful like at least half a second instead of 0.2sec for 720p and 0.1sec for 1080p. Think again, it seems we will not get anywhere near usable times in 2019 from the Xperia Line again. Your best bet for recording on Sony will be to get a camera like the excellent RX Series that allow much longer recording times and greater resolution.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←

This week Sony Announced Xperia 1, the successor to their previous flagship the Xperia XZ3 with a few new features and a very ultra-wide 21:9 CinemaWide™ 4K HDR OLED display which creates cinematic like aspect ratio UHD video with what they claim Cinealta HDR color science. The footage does look impressive at first glance but we have to remember the small sensor on phones simply cannot compete with an APS-C or Full Frame Cinealta camera sensor.

The good news is that the phone continues to offer the 960fps Full HD 1080p spec as in previous phones the XZ series. Sony chose to not allow initial samples of footage shot in various modes including the high speed because the phone is not finalized. From anecdotal evidence, it seems to compare favorably with their Xperia XZ3 but with some better color characteristics due to the Cinealta heritage color LUTs.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←

The Tesla500 Youtube Channel is at it again with an impressive build and experiment. David Kronstein the creator of the Chronos has attached a camera to a specially modified mower and blade assembly to shoot what a lawnmower does directly on the blade’s edge. The mower was only run at 1/2 speed, to avoid a camera failure, resulted in about 180 G-forces at the edge of the camera.

Needless to say, it really shows how good the camera is at withstanding abuse. While we do not condone you do this with any camera it is cool to know it can be done and still have beautiful high speed imagery to go with it. Congrats to David for the successful build! The G-forces involved would kill any living thing with a brain in seconds hence why a camera is a good subject, Please don’t try this at home! Watch the video below:→ Continue Reading Full Post ←